My name is Elyse Schmidt, and I was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. I went to a small university name Concordia where I received my bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. Thanks to the work/study program available to the undergraduate biochemistry students, I was able to gain experience working in industrial and academic labs. I’ve worked on HIV, HSV-1, calorie restriction in yeast and wood pulping chemistry. In my spare time I like watching movies, reading and camping.

When it came time for graduate school applications, I decided to break free of my icy prison and migrate towards warmer climes at Duke. At Duke, I joined Greg Talyor's lab in the VA hospital. Our lab studies IRGs, a family of proteins that have been established to be critical for vertebrate innate immunity, particularly from bacterial pathogens. Recent genetic linkage studies suggest Crohn’s disease is associated with SNPs upstream of the human IRGM gene. My project aims to define the mechanism through which murine Irgm1, the closest IRGM human homologue, is involved in and regulates mitophagy and the inflammatory processes.